president clinton says this is an urgent problem. the chairman of the joint military -- chairman of the joint chiefs of staffs says it's our number one national defense issue. so why are we dealing with it? i think we are not dealing with it, a, because it's hard to do. b, because on both sides of the aisle we have not been effective in dealing with this before. i remember when we had an all-republican cast of characters here in town. president bush, a republican majority here, there must have been 55 of us, we tried to reduce the growth of medicare over five years from 54% to 51% -- to 41% and couldn't do it. now, no one is cutting anything. we're saying we're going to reduce the growth of medicare spending from 44% to 41% over five years, and we couldn't get the votes to do that. so this isn't -- this isn't -- this isn't easy to do. robert mary who wrote a book about president polk had lunch with us the other day and made this statement. in america's history, every crisis has been solved by presidential leadership or not at all. ev